Former British MP Eric Joyce has been spared jail despite being found guilty of possessing the worst kind of child abuse pornography.
Joyce, an ex- army officer who was a Labout MP between 2000 and 2012, pleaded guilty in July to a charge of making an indecent photograph of a child.
Ipswich Crown Court heard that the category A film, the most serious there is, was accessed by Eric Joyce between August 2013 and November 2018. It featured what appeared to be seven different children aged between 12 months and seven years.
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On Friday Joyce was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence, which was suspended for two years.
Breitbart reports: He was ordered to attend an 18-day rehabilitation activity, pay prosecution costs of £1,800, ordered to undertake 150 hours of unpaid work, and received a sexual harm prevention order.
The former shadow minister for Northern Ireland had been told at an earlier hearing that his offence crossed the custody threshold, with Judge Peters saying in July: “It’s going to be a question of whether it’s immediate or suspended.”
Joyce was the MP for Falkirk from 2000 to 2015. He served the first 12 of those years as a Labour MP before becoming an independent.
Police had arrested him in 2018 and found on one of his electronic devices a 51-second film depicting “the penetrative sexual abuse of very young children” between the ages of one to seven years, according to Sky News. It was determined to be a “Category A movie”, depicting the worst kinds of child sexual abuse.
The prosecution added that there was evidence Joyce had searched for “material for five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10-year-old girls”.
The offence took place between August 2013 and November 2018 — conceivably occurring during his time in the House of Commons.
